News

Various resources are publically available for those in the research community looking for funding opportunities and research materials related to COVID-19. In an effort to collect those resources for COVID-19 research, the following links are made available here and on the SOBC Resources page.

1. The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research’s (OBSSR) collection of funding opportunities specific to COVID-19 and the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Link here.

2. NIH Public Health Emergency and Disaster Research Response (DR2). NIH DR2 provides various data collection tools, resources, and training materials for public health emergencies and disasters, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Link here.

The Office of Strategic Coordination (OSC), which manages the Common Fund, is issuing this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) to stimulate innovative research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it causes, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). OSC seeks new, innovative perspectives and approaches to the prevention of, preparation for, or response to coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, domestically or internationally. The funding for this supplement is provided from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, 2020.

OSC is therefore offering Emergency Competitive Revisions to active Common Fund grants and cooperative agreements addressing the research objectives described below.

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) is seeking broad public input on important new directions for health-related behavioral and social sciences research (BSSR). Specifically, OBSSR requests your input on research directions (see RFI): that will support the achievement of the scientific priorities in the OBSSR Strategic Plan 2022-2026 (see current strategic plan) and that will advance or transform the broader health impact of BSSR. OBSSR is interested in focusing on research directions that are trans-disease and cross-cutting in nature and address critical gaps in the field.

The National Institute on Aging-funded Stress Measurement Network, in collaboration with Gateway to Global Aging Data (see g2aging.org), produced by the Program on Global Aging, Health & Policy, University of Southern California, has recently completed the harmonization of psychosocial stress variables across nine longitudinal studies on aging from around the world.

These newly harmonized psychosocial stress measures allow researchers to compare and contrast relationships between stress constructs (e.g., exposures, responses, buffers) with health and aging outcomes, within and across different geographic and cultural contexts. The data are free to the public as part of the Health and Retirement Study family of studies and include data from the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, and Costa Rica. The stress types that have been harmonized across each wave of these studies are stressful life events, traumatic events, chronic stress, childhood adversity, discrimination, loneliness, social isolation, relationship strain, work stress, and neighborhood safety.

To foster the utilization of this rich resource, the Stress Measurement Network will support five exemplar projects that examine cross-national relationships between stress and aging with mentorship from senior faculty, priority access to the harmonized data and the lead data programmer, statistical consulting, and a $2,500 honorarium.

The National Center for Advancing Translation Science has an open funding opportunity for examining Ethical Issues in Translational Science Research. The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement is to support collaboration between bioethicists, legal scholars, social scientists, and translational research scientists. The focus is to develop knowledge to inform the ethical development, modification, or application of novel findings, technologies, and approaches to improve human health, including their impact on individuals, families, communities, and society.

T32 Precision Lifestyle Medicine and Translation Research (PREMIER) Postdoctoral Training Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago

The program objective is to provide postdoctoral fellows who aspire to be both independent investigators and team scientists in lifestyle medicine the opportunity to develop skills in prevention and control of cardiovascular and respiratory chronic conditions translational research.

Fellows can focus their research and skill developments in either of these cores of central interest:

Ideas to interventions (I2I) is a new community, formed in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The I2I community is a first step toward achieving the goal of building and nurturing a network of researchers who are interested in “early-phase behavioral translation research,” – the translation of novel ideas and approaches from basic behavioral and social sciences research into new strategies to address pressing clinical or public health problems. The primary objective is to broaden, deepen and build new connections among individuals interested and engaged in developing new and potentially more effective approaches to behavioral health problems, including researchers, clinicians, patients and the public.

This website (https://i2ihub.org/) will host information for members, and potential members, to learn more about each other’s work.

Funding Opportunity Purpose: This FOA invites applications for planning cooperative agreements (U34) for a national, multisite, observational cohort study to prospectively examine the risk and protective factors for neurocognitive complications of pediatric type 1 diabetes (T1D; onset approximately ages 5-10 years) and a comparison sample. The U34 is designed to: 1) Permit early peer review of the rationale for the proposed cohort study; 2) Permit assessment of the study design; and 3) Provide support for the development of essential elements required for the design and conduct of the cohort study and the management and analysis of the study data. Consultation with NIDDK scientific staff is strongly encouraged prior to the submission of the U34 application.

Application Due Date: April 11, 2019, by 5:00 PM local time of applicant organization